Navodayas, IIM team up to go beyond mere education

By Prashant K. Nanda New Delhi, Feb 25 (IANS) To take education beyond the classroom and blackboard, senior administrators of the Navodaya Vidyalayas, or elite state-run schools, have been trained at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow, to pick up skills in career counselling, change management and team building among others. “The aim is to make our students grow as complete and successful individuals,” A.N. Ramachandra, deputy commissioner of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti (NVS), told IANS.

Navodaya Vidyalayas, affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), have been doing tremendously well in board examinations and in some cases even better than private schools. There are 565 schools under the NVS umbrella.

Twenty-three assistant and deputy commissioners of the NVS from across the country trained at the Lucknow campus for five days last month.

Sushil Kumar, an IIM Lucknow professor, told IANS on phone: “These senior administrators need to learn new things so that they can teach the school principals and reap the benefits at school levels.

“We told them how to use audio, video and digital material to broaden students’ perspective about a subject. We also told them to use various mediums of communication to handle classroom theories.”

“From career counselling to stress management, from student teacher relation to use of new technologies in classrooms, it was part of our capsule management course,” Kumar said.

“If a student is good in art, music or athletics, teachers must take avid interest in that and help hone his or her skills. Unless we do this, students will develop stress and a syndrome called stick personality. Students, teachers and parents need to work as a team and build the career of the students,” said Kumar.

“Leadership, team building, human capital management are some of the things we learnt at IIM Lucknow,” Ramachandra told IANS on telephone from Hyderabad.

“Management development programmes are essential to achieve success. The perspective of education has changed and we need to learn it to help our students be successful,” he said.

Ramachandra had undergone a similar training programme at IIM Kolkata.

Asked about the fee charged for training the NVS staff, Kumar said: “As NVS is a government set up we gave them a 50 percent discount on our regular fee structure.”

Normally, IIM Lucknow charges a fee of Rs.25,000 per person for a five day training programme.

“I am sure, the trainees must have left as changed people and the benefit will certainly percolate to the ground,” said Kumar.

NVS is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Human Resource Development with the minister as its chairman.

More such capsule management courses are on the anvil for other Navodaya Vidyalaya administrators.